By Jemina Harry

July 2, 2025

When a researcher begins the journey of selecting a reagent, they often start by comparing supplier websites, evaluating available datasheets and turning to published research.

Evaluating real-world research data is an essential step where trust is built. Scientists can see how their peers have used a product and whether it would be suitable for their experimental set-up.

In this blog, we’ll dive into how researchers are using citations (with some stats from our search engine, a tool for reagent selection which ranks products by citation count), as well as insight straight from past interviews with scientists.

A Typical Researcher’s Journey for Reagent Selection 

Stripping it back to basics, how may a researcher may go about finding their next reagent? Here’s a simple, example journey: 

1. They have a target—say a specific protein or pathway—and begin their search online.
2. They open several supplier websites, looking at specifications and supporting data. They may have a favourite supplier, or use a search engine like CiteAb here. 
3. They dive into publications to find evidence of successful use in similar experiments. Published images are often key here, providing visual evidence.
4. After finding a few examples of a reagent being used successfully in a similar experiment, they purchase the reagent from the company site.
   

This isn’t just theoretical. We have tracked millions of searches and over 280,000 publication link clicks this year alone on CiteAb, showing that product references, and the data within publications, is a major part of product evaluation.

If your product pages aren’t clearly showcasing citation data, you could be losing potential customers to competitors who are.

So, how are researchers interacting with this data? 

What are researchers looking for within citation data? 

Product Citation Count Matters

Our conversations with users of the CiteAb search engine demonstrates that citation count often helps to instill confidence and credibility, as you may expect. Here’s what one researcher told us:

“ Whenever possible, we try to select the most highly cited antibodies.” – Dr Radtke, NIAID/NIH, read our interview with her here.

Having citation count clearly displayed may help you build trust on your pages. Citation recency is key here – having up to date references increases counts and ensures your tools look like the current solution when compared against competitors.

Collecting this data manually may lead to gaps or outdated information. With the CiteAb Widget (a plug-in tool for supplier pages that updates with product citations collected by us), this process is automated—ensuring citation data is always current.

Experimental Details are Essential

Beyond the actual counts, experimental details are essential to guide the selection process. 

“my colleagues and me search for the most highly cited antibody, with accompanying images, by application, reactivity, conjugate, and many other critical fields.”

Providing this data in a clear format on your site (such as by tagging publications with core information, or providing graphical summaries) may aid researchers in their selection process – and increase the likelihood they stay on your page. 

One researcher showed how this sort of data helps their reagent selection when using CiteAb:

‘I particularly appreciate the section that summarises the different dilutions used and for which applications.” Lubna Nuhu-Soso, Biology PhD student at the University of York. 

To add more evidence, CiteAb Widget filters for publications such as reactivity and application were changed over 27,000 times on our widgets last year—proving that users aren’t just passively browsing; they’re actively exploring and evaluating.

Why Images Matter

Undoubtedly, images from publications are a powerful way for researchers to validate product performance. 

A couple of researchers explained:

“We find the example images and links to papers with experimental details the most useful for validating potential candidates for our imaging studies. Using images from the literature, we can discern for ourselves if a reagent yields the appropriate labeling pattern prior to purchase.”

And

“I found it [CiteAb] super helpful to determine what a specific signal using the antibody should look like.”

It’s no surprise, then, that over 83,000 image modals were opened through our platform last year. Our images are cropped to the panel of interest, to help researchers quickly see the exact reagent of interest in use. 

We’ve had feedback from one of our partners that using images from the literature can help showcase validation images or images for product applications not yet tested by the company but evidenced in the literature.

Are you highlighting both in-house and literature-sourced images on your product pages? If not, you might be missing a key opportunity to convert potential customers. 

Wrap-up

Citation data isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s an essential part of how researchers choose products.

If you’re not already showcasing this data on your site, now could be the time to explore this. If you are, using a plug-in tool like our widget could help improve your user experience and save your team time. Reach out to the team here for a demo!